CBD@PopularMechanics _ June 2019 47IL
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- Repeat at the same
tick mark on the oppo-
site side. Work your
way outward, alternat-
ing sides, then restart
in the center. Stop
when you’ve reached
the desired bend. - On the tubing, mark
the center point of the
bend. Add tick marks
in both directions—
one inch per mark for
at least two inches. - Insert the tubing so
the center mark aligns
with the center of the
jack. Make sure the
pins above the jack,
which the pipe presses
against as it bends, are
widely spaced. Crank
the jack until the bend
starts to form. - Lower the jack and
slide the tubing to one
side, lining it up with
the first tick mark out.
Crank the jack back up,
deepening the bend.
How to Bend
Metal Tubing
Harbor Freight’s
16-ton heavy-duty
hydraulic pipe bender
uses a bottle jack to
bend workpieces.
It’s inexpensive
but very effective—
if you’re careful.
Here’s how Wicks
and I adapted black-
smithing technique
to produce smooth
bends without
collapsing the tubing.is dim when the torch is off, but it becomes almost opaque when it
senses light, like the world’s darkest Transitions lenses. Even just a
little bit of light, which is all I was creating with the torch. I wasn’t
positioned right, and the air gap was too big for a strong arc to form.
It sputtered and hissed like a short circuit. Wicks shouted at me to
move closer. I brought in the torch and corrected the angle. Sud-
denly, with everything in position, the arc strengthened and held
steady, humming like a power line. It glowed bright enough to illu-
minate the workpiece. I could see the seam, and Wicks helped me
pace my travel along it. I turned off the torch and lifted the mask.
My weld was a blobby carbuncle on the joint—especially compared
to one of Wicks’s, which looked like a long-healed seam of scar tissue.
The two of us worked together to weld the entire basket. Then we
went back over the welds, filing them down with an angle grinder to
get them ready to paint. When we were finished, as Wicks was clean-
ing up, I lifted one side of the rack to test the weight. It was hard tobelieve that something I’d helped cut,
bend, and weld wouldn’t crack apart at
the slightest stress. But it held.
The last job was to give the rack a
coat of black paint. Wicks told me he
hated painting, but after days of cut-
ting steel, bending steel, superheating
and flattening steel, and melting steel,
I expected painting to be the easiest
part by far.
Wicks was right. Painting steel
sucks. Mixing the paint takes patience.
It drips. It’s dirty. It doesn’t dry fast
enough. And then you’ve got another
coat to do.
That was all I could think about,
until I realized it was the same kind
of list I’d had running through my
head about steel just a few days earlier.
Whether it’s wood or steel, paint or lac-
quer—you figure out how to work with
the materials you need to make the
things you want. That’s the surest way
to get the exact thing you need.